Process Structuring in Electronic Brainstorming

Alan R. Dennis, Joseph S. Valacich, Terry Connolly and Bayard E. Wynne
Additional contact information
Alan R. Dennis: Department of Management, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602
Joseph S. Valacich: Decision and Information Systems Department, School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405
Terry Connolly: Department of Management and Policy, College of Business, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721
Bayard E. Wynne: Decision and Information Systems Department, School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405

Information Systems Research, 1996, vol. 7, issue 2, 268-277

Abstract: One aspect of brainstorming that has received little research attention is how the brainstorming problem should be presented to the group, whether as one all-encompassing question or as a series of separate questions each focusing on one aspect of the problem. This paper reports the results of two experiments in which subjects (MBAs in the first, senior executives in the second) electronically brainstormed on intact problems (where all parts of the problem were presented simultaneously) or on decomposed problems (where three subcategories of the problem were sequentially posed to the groups). In both experiments, groups using the decomposed process generated 60% more ideas. We attribute these differences to the ability of time constraints to increase the rate of idea generation, and the ability of problem decomposition to refocus members' attention more evenly across the entire problem.

Keywords: group support systems (GSS); electronic brainstorming; decomposition; structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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